Käthe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) spent her life on subjects most of her contemporaries avoided: poverty, labour, hunger, war and the grief that follows it. She trained as a painter and became one of the great printmakers instead, working in etching, lithography and woodcut, and later in sculpture. The Weavers and Peasants' War cycles made her reputation. Her son Peter was killed in Flanders in 1914 and her grandson in 1942, and the loss runs through everything she made afterwards. She was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, and the Nazis expelled her in 1933 and forbade her to exhibit. This archive holds high-resolution scans of her prints and drawings, free to preview and available as originals for printing.